


Do I Dare, Yes I Dare, I Dare to Wake Up and Get Up & That Is Enough

by crowleyshouseplant



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Claire-centric, F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-21
Updated: 2015-04-21
Packaged: 2018-03-25 02:02:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3792424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowleyshouseplant/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Episode 4: Coda where Claire first returns to her friends house before returning with Matt to his.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Do I Dare, Yes I Dare, I Dare to Wake Up and Get Up & That Is Enough

Claire didn’t so much fall asleep as she gingerly and gently crawled into bed (not even her bed, her friend’s bed), and stared up at the ceiling, hands rigid at her sides. It hurt, but everything hurt. It hurt to lie on her back. It hurt to lie on her stomach. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to remember and she couldn’t stop remembering, everything bleeding over into everything else no matter how many times she pretended to set fire to the memories so they would finally be gone for good, burned to dust and ash.

She could feel her jaw swelling. The tear of skin across her eye. The sting of the alcohol.

The soft press of Mike’s–no Matt’s–fingers ghosting across her wounds, tending to them as she had once tended to his when she’d dragged him half dead and half alive from a garbage bin and every other time after that.

In the darkness, in the house that wasn’t hers, in her friend’s home, she closed her eyes and saw the bat, the swinging bat, and opened them again, swallowing past the rawness that scraped her throat, past the way it swelled as her eyes stung with tears she impatiently wiped away with the cuff of her too-big hoodie.

The fucking cat mewed at the door. She sneezed into her arm and her ribs cracked, aftershocks of pain that made her dizzy, and she held two fingers to her pulse point, trying to count its thready, skittering beat.

It was over, and she was still afraid–afraid of what happened, of what could happen because of one decision she had made in a split second, without thinking it through, without knowing all the facts, afraid of the shadows that filled the kitchen but she couldn’t turn on the lights–couldn’t justify it–afraid of that scritching scratching sound she remembered too late as being just that cat again, pacing the fucking floor, ruining the paint on the door. Thanks for nothing, she wanted to say out loud. Thanks for the warning. Thanks for scratching any of those assholes across their eyes.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

She laid back against the thin pillow. Sweat made her sticky and heat burned under her skin. She’d know in the morning if it was infection or if it was just the fear, the adrenaline, burning through her system like fever. 

She’d be better in the morning. Soon, she would be well. In mind and body and spirt.

Clutching the thin blankets in her fists, she brought them up to her chin. Her eyes were open. The ceiling was white and stuck with peeling plaster. A weight settled on her feet–that stupid cat–and she didn’t have it in her to nudge it off. 

It was hard to believe that everything would be okay.

And it wasn’t Mike’s–Matt’s fault. She had chosen to pull him from the dumpster. The Russians had chosen to come after her, to come after Santino (and she wanted to believe Matt, that the boy would be fine but she knew they must have hurt him too, and even after the physical wounds had healed, they lurked in the heart and the mind and they resurfaced and they reopened and they would flare with pain and sometimes fade into a dull ache, a ghost of something bad that had happened but that would never be forgotten–)

And it was nobody’s fault but the Russians.

The thought didn’t make her feel better.

She must have fallen asleep because next thing she knew, a soft knock-knocking at her door woke her, and her muscles tensed, her hands fumbling their way from where they had been tangled up in the covers. “It’s me. It’s Matt.” His voice came through the other side.

Relief slowly thawed through her, and she slumped in the bed–one leg over the edge of the drooping mattress while her hand gripped the bedside table, the one that safeguarded her friend’s Qur’an in its drawer. “Come in.”

The door creaked open, and she saw Matt’s silhouette before she saw him. He came to her like an ordinary man. Suit and tie and everything. He wore glasses instead of a mask–the lenses a thick deep red. Business shoes instead of black combat boots. His knuckles were raw and red, and his fingers held a bag that smelled good, and she suddenly remembered how hungry she was. 

“Good morning,” he said. “I brought you breakfast.”

It was a sushi burrito, from that place on the corner. Once, she had mentioned she liked it, and he had remembered. “Do you want it now?”

She shook her head, then said, “Put it in the fridge. For later.” She didn’t think she could eat. Her stomach was still queasy, sick with fear, still tender from healing. 

Her head ached, and she was glad that he did not think to open the blinds, as her friend would have done. Light, she would always say as she pulled up the blinds, light makes everything better. Vitamin D, you don’t get enough of that cooped up in that hospital.

Yeah, right.

She missed working. She missed her friends at the hospital. She missed saving lives.

Maybe the mask she wore wasn’t like Matt’s–wasn’t a vigilante’s mask, but her work was important too, and she missed it. 

Dry food fell into that damn cat’s bowl, and she saw Matt bent over it, his thumb resting on the inside lip so that he could know when the bowl was full enough. The cat twined itself around his legs, his feet, mewing piteously as its tail curled around his knees. He patted it gently once, twice, on the head before rising. His jacket was unbuttoned and she realized that if he were comfortable in it, he would have buttoned it as he stood.

She had never really understood why rich, important men did that. Unbutton to sit down, button to stand up. She shook her head, ran her fingers through the shaved side of it. Her hair was growing out. Maybe she should shave it again–

“Thank you,” she said. 

He smiled a sad, small smile. “It’s the least I could do.” He stood beside the foot of the bed. “May I?”

“Sure.”

He sat at the foot of her bed. His body was warm against her feet, a presence that was very there, like a surety, a promise. His hands were on his knees, fingers playing at the fabric. 

A nervous tch she’d seen before. Not when he was fighting. Not when he was getting fixed up after a fight.

But here, in these in between spaces. That pause between one breath and the next.

She looked down and saw that she was playing with a fraying thread from the blanket, pulling it loose and wrapping it around her finger until the flesh swelled and became bloodless and a tingling buzzed in her fingertips. 

“I don’t think you should stay here,” he said. There was a bit of a rasp to his voice. It made it sound deeper than it actually was. 

“You’re saying I should return home?” she asked, joking, because of course that wasn’t what he meant. She had lived in that apartment for a long time. She had crashed here for a long time. She stared at the ceiling. Would she no longer be able to call another roof hers? Would she no longer have a room of her own, even if she paid too much in rent? 

Home. Home was safe. Home was there. Home didn’t have broken open doors and fingernail marks on the floors, or that spot where her shoes had scudded against the fake wood, when she had struggled and it hadn’t mattered, they had taken her anyway, just as they had taken her home and who knew when she’d be able to go back there, back to slow evenings alone with a glass of boxed wine and something on the television, to hanging out with her friends, barhopping maybe landing at Josie’s before finally returning home and crashing without one shoe off and one shoe on. 

She breathed and pressed a hand over her ribs.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” he said, voice too serious. She knew he could smile–had seen it when he had made light of the beatings he’d taken. “You should come stay with me.” He paused. “I’d still make sure your friend’s cat was fed.”

“And what happens when that’s not safe, Matt?” She pulled her legs up to her chest. “What then?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Claire slumped against the wall. “You know what I do know, though?” He turned towards her, waiting, and she smiled at him. “That I could really use some coffee.”

For the first time, his hands stopped sifting across his knees. “Of course.” He stood, and she fell into a light doze as the sound of water filling the pot burbled against cheap glass. The soft pouring of the grounds. The steady, slurping dripping noise as the maker brewed and brewed, and the smell of coffee filled the small room, and it reminded her of home as Matt pressed a tall, warm mug full of sweet black coffee into her hands. She curled her sore fingers around it, her fingers pressing against his for an instant as she breathed in its heady steam.

Even though Matt wasn’t the first half-dead body she had found or even patched up without calling the cops or the ambulances, everything afterwards had been different, dangerous, terrifying. And this cup of coffee, made just as she liked it, somehow promised that it wouldn’t always be like this, that there was some chance she could go home, and she held onto it with both hands as Matt settled at the foot of the bed once more.


End file.
